Clex snippit - Altered Reality -1

You're going to hate me for this 'snippit'. It's less a snippit than a 18,000 word story that petered out and got used as the basis for another story. I think I took some of the premises and utilized them in 'Stranded' - - maybe.

Working title was 'Altered Reality' and I'll post it in 4 or 5 sections.



The subject’s name was Clementine Rawlins and Lex watched from a control room outside a static-depolarization field that seemed to be the only thing capable of blunting her unusual abilities.

She was a long time resident of Smallville, but a short-time mutant, having gained her powers only a few years past, during the second hail of destruction from the sky. She had been trapped in her storage shed, next to a sizable chunk of meteor rock for almost two days before rescuers had come to dig her out of the wreckage. More than long enough, research showed, for the agitated radiation of the rocks to have altered genetic structure irrevocably. More than enough to drive her mad.

But madness, to some degree or another, seemed a common byproduct of meteor-generated alterations. According to interviews of her neighbors, the oddness surrounding Clem Rawlins had started around sixteen months ago. Little things that made people blink and think twice and then doubt their own senses. She’d stare into space at things that other people couldn’t see, and sometimes between one blink and another, she’d have something in her hand that she hadn’t before. Or be holding something, some bit of refuse or an empty cup and she’d reach forward and some trick of the mind or of the light would make it see as if her hand disappeared into nothingness and she’d pull it back empty. Or stranger things, that people didn’t like talking about. Of objects seemingly embedded in her walls, pots half in and half out of plaster, or shoes or other household items, of hearing the distant hum of voices when Clem was staring at a blank spot in the wall like it was a TV set, and then hearing nothing at all.

It wasn’t until a sister-in-law stopped by one afternoon in an impromptu visit and found the leg of Clem’s husband sticking out of the kitchen wall as if it had grown there and the rest of him incontrovertibly gone - - just vanished, that she’d become more than just a local curiosity.

She’d claimed he’d threatened to leave her and she’d simply helped him along the way. The police wanted to know where the rest of him was, and she’d said, serious as stone, that she’d sent him to the other place, and that she was sorry all of him hadn’t gotten though. He’d miss that foot.

Of course they thought her crazy. They figured she’d cut him up into bits and disposed of the evidence. All except that damning section of lower leg. No one really cared to investigate too thoroughly how it had come to be growing out of a wall. In Smallville some things were taken at face value.

Lex underestimated nothing that had any link to the Smallville meteor showers. Any scrap of the unusual his people gathered data on. And when the chance arose, they gathered more than data.

In two days Clem Rawlins had been transferred out of the county mental facility to which she had been admitted to a more secure compound of a private nature. Lex had an understanding with the administrator of Belle Reeve and there were some patients, that were simply better off where proper precautions might be taken - - where proper understanding of their abnormalities might be gained.

And sometimes that took prodding. Sometimes a little inhumanity had to be practiced to understand the limits of humanity. Sometimes people hid the things that made them different, or sometimes they didn’t even know they were. Lex’s people had gotten very good at uncovering secrets. At peeling back layers to find inner truths.

Clem Rawlins was being prodded. They’d tried the easy way first - - simply asking. Interview after interview. They were not needlessly cruel, especially to subjects whose cooperation they might eventually require. But she was uncooperative, in a state of denial. Other methods were required.

She was 49 and had haunted eyes, but you had to look past that, to the fact that she could pull objects out of nowhere and make bodies disappear into the same negative space - - well, most of a body.

She had an aversion to snakes. A phobia. A platform came up, with a clear plastic cage in the center of the holding cell, with a coiled, serpentine occupant. Not a poisonous variety, they weren’t so careless with their subjects, but a person with a fear wouldn’t differentiate between a garden-variety corn snake and any other.

She started backing away, torn between hyperventilation and screams, as soon as she saw it and when it undulated out, slithering across the featureless metal floor, she rocked in her corner, crying incoherently. Cursing them perhaps.

“Send it away, Mrs. Rawlins.” The tech outside the depolarization field told her. She scrambled along the wall, and begged release.

Lex canted his head and observed, impassive. She wasn’t an innocent. She’d stopped being an innocent the day the meteors altered her genetic makeup and accident of fate or no, her fear was a small price to pay if it brought them one step closer to understanding the wellspring of human potential.

Her movement and her noise drew the reptile, doubtless no less terrified than the woman.

“She’s on the verge of collapse. Look at her vitals.” One of the doctors said beside him, intent on his monitors. They weren’t sure the extent or nature of her abilities, though they theorized. Was she creating matter and obliterating it, with the power of her will? Or might she be actually breaching the barrier of time/space, seeing future or past or different realities altogether, and snatching things into or out of her own little wormholes?

Either way, it was a staggering power, if it could be harnessed. If it could be replicated the potential might be limitless. There were other theories, but only Clem Rawlins could describe what it was she was seeing and touching and where the things went that she sent through her own personal portals.

“Send it away. Like you did the trey in your room.” The tech urged.

Two nights after she’d come here, before they’d perfected the depolarization field, she’d banished her supper tray, screaming about the contents of her meal. Apparently fish was also not to her liking.

“Bastards,” she screamed, staring at the one-way glass of the control room panel beyond the field.

“Her vitals - -” the doctor reiterated. “Heart rate’s 242, blood pressure - -“

And something did happen. The floor opened up before Clem Rawlins. Or more accurately, it disappeared along with the scaly object of her irrational terror. Simply ceased to be. And its abrupt departure destabilized the connecting walls, severed circuits that were vital to power and the field sputtered out and died, along with every other electronically powered device in the facility.

The control room was plunged into darkness. Inky and complete.

“Get the back up generator on line. Get her secured. Now.” Lex leaned forward, squinting out through the window, willing his eyes to adjust to darkness, ignoring the frantic babble of the researchers in the room with him.

Unexpected. But the unexpected happened when you dealt with the meteor infected. The walls shook, and the cries of men could be heard outside the control room. There was the flash of a drive stun taser. An aborted scream, but it wasn’t that of a woman. The rumbling impact of a something large falling and the glass on the control panel window shattered just as the red emergency lights along the floor blinked on, courtesy of a back up generator that should have been active as soon as the power cut.

“The ceiling is coming down,”someone cried, and the blood-red safety lights backed up the claim.

“Evacuate. Get everyone out,” Lex snapped, whirling himself to stalk out. “Where’s security?”

There was madness out in the hall, and a great deal of the tan uniformed facility security fumbling about in the wake of Clem Rawlins destruction. She’d taken out the wall in front of the cell and most likely the tech who’d been standing there. There was no body to indicate otherwise. The wall beyond that was gone and the roof over it as well. No debris, other than what had fallen free of the severed edges of the building.

Lex cursed, panicking a little at the extent of it, at the unforgivable miscalculation of her power. But he shook it off, kept a cool face in front of his people. They were agitated enough without seeing any loss of control from him. There were other subjects in this facility, other dangerous metahumans that needed to be secured if containment systems failed. He gathered security personal as he went, passing orders along as he threaded through the path of Clem Rawlins escape. Something shuddered and collapsed and it shook the floor. The domino effect. One wall disappeared and another fell and another followed and another.

He had a care for his people, not to get caught in this, unfortunate victims of an unfortunate blunder. He had a care for the other subjects, valuable assets that they were and not all of them inadvertent killers like Clem Rawlins. He’d already been on the phone, setting forces in motion to speed back up resources here, backup containment before things got further out of hand than they already were. But that help was forty-five minutes away at best and his men here were scattered.

It made him edgy and angry, that loss of control and it was harder to contain than it might have been half a year ago, when his world had been less chaotic. He snapped at a man who ran up to him, reporting that she was outside, loose in the woods surrounding the facility.

“Incompetents. She’s one middle aged woman and you’re trained professionals. Go help with the evacuation since you’re useless at the job you were hired.”

He took a breath, after the security guard had run back into the building, trying to gather calm. Ignoring the nervous eyes of the other two men that waited behind him. It was hard to find it, that cool reserve, when there might be dead under rubble. Dead who might be traced back to him, no matter what compensation was offered - - and it would be given generously- - to grieving families. The last thing he needed was more attention from small town law. Not after . . .

He shut down that train of thought with a vengeance and climbed through the last gaping hole in the wall and into the deceptive quiet of night. There were 120 acres of forested land surrounding the facility. Beyond that farmland and beyond that - - seven miles west, Smallville proper. If she got that far, there’d be hell to pay.

In the state of mind she was in - - if this power surge she was experiencing continued - - retaking her alive might not be a viable option. He told security and they passed the word along, a low babble of voices on comm. units.

There were jeeps, the only things that could easily deal with the pits and grooves of the washed out dirt road that led to the facility from the main road. He got in one on the passenger side and reached his secondary team leader on the phone, demanding ETA.

The headlights caught something pale at the side of the road, disappearing into the woods.

“Stop. There she is.” The jeep skidded, halfway off the pseudo road and into the bramble at the side. His two security dogs spilled out after her - - or what he thought was her, and Lex pulled the back up gun out of the glove compartment, checked the clip and followed.

He didn’t want her dead. But dead was safer than loose, when loose was a liability he couldn’t afford.

They hadn’t driven far from the facility, which meant she’d circled back, or hidden close instead of fleeing outright. The woods at night were treacherous - - roots and shadow camouflaged branches tangling in feet and catching clothing. They were bad enough in the light of day, he hated them at night. He ought to be back at the jeep, coordinating this instead of running through the undergrowth.

But, the rush felt good. The surge of adrenalin felt like release for controlled frustration.

There was a scream ahead of him. The thud of impact. He pushed through something with thorns that tore at the fine weave of his coat and saw a trio of unlikely things.

The two security guards down, the woman crouched, back to a tree, eyes wide, but face oddly expressionless.

But really, what Lex focused on was Clark Kent, standing between the sprawled guards and the woman like some avenging angle in worn denim and K-mart windbreaker.

Honestly, Lex should have been surprised. It would have been reasonable to be surprised to find Clark out here, in the middle of what for all intents and purposes was nowhere. But then Clark had a habit of being in the wrong place at the right time and surprise was one of those emotions, much like affection and forgiveness, that Lex stopped feeling for him long ago.

A little bit of rage spilled up. Indignation at Clark’s mere existence in the center of Lex’s affairs yet one more time. It was almost enough to make him forget the greater threat of Clem Rawlings. Almost.

“You’re on private property, Clark,” he said, shifting his gaze beyond Clark to the woman. Careful, because there were two unpredictable things here, but the greater of the two was crouched against a tree.

“What are you doing out here? This is Mrs. Rawlins. She’s supposed to be in Belle Reeve. How did she get here and why do you have people chasing her through the woods?”

So many questions that Lex had no intention of answering. Clark was narrow eyed and angry, spitting righteous indignation as he turned towards Clem Rawlings. If she sent him along the path of half Lex’s facility, it would serve him right.

“I’d be careful,” Lex warned lightly.

He slipped the gun in his pocket and carefully crouched and picked up one of the fallen tasers. He wouldn’t shoot her in front of Clark. He wouldn’t shoot Clark, though God knew it would be therapeutic. He’d taser either one, possibly both, if the opportunity arose.

The guards weren’t her work. If they were, they’d be gone, or partially gone. Which meant Clark had taken out two armed men. By the force of his personality? Lex seriously doubted it.

Clark glared warning at him, and approached the woman.

“Mrs. Rawlins? It’s okay. I won’t let them hurt you. Do you recognize me?”

Her gaze shifted, focusing on Clark, squinting through the shadows. “Martha’s boy. You’re Martha’s boy.”

Clark nodded, smiling. And she softened at that deceptive smile, just like anyone did, who was graced by it and didn’t know it was nothing more than a pretty facade for lies upon lies.

Of course, Clark knew her. Her husband had been a farmer and the farmers of Smallville were a close-knit community. They’d have attended bar-b-ques and hayrides and barn raisings together.

“You might not want to get too close.” Lex didn’t want to be accused of not giving fair warning. He didn’t particularly want Clark sucked into oblivion if it could be helped - - he might even concede that he’d go out of his way to avoid it happening. But that would involve Clark actually listening to him.

“Shut up, Lex. What have you done to her?”

And that seemed to spur something in her, because her eyes narrowed and she glared past Clark to Lex and rose, stabbing out a finger in accusation.

“You did this . . . you made me . . .”

Something rippled out. A faint sliver of disturbance almost undetectable under the cover of darkness. Lex could feel it more distinctly than he could see it. It passed Clark and Clark simply wasn’t there anymore. Devoured like inconsequential prey and Lex experienced a jolting stab of shock, unexpected and terrible, at the loss of him.

He screamed something. At her perhaps. Maybe at the echo of Clark. He dropped the taser and reached for the gun, having the sudden very passionate urge to put a bullet in her head.

And then the ripple washed over him, and it took his breath and his equilibrium for a moment. He staggered, the gun half out of his pocket, and tripped over a root. He went down in the soft earth, in mulch and dead leaves and lost the gun.

“Where did she go? What happened to her?” Clark whirled on him, demanding.

Clark whirled on him . . .

Lex stared up, hand paused in his search for the gun, breath caught in his throat. Clark stalked to the tree the woman had been crouched before as if it held some clue, then stared out into the darkened forest intently.

Lex stared at Clark. Coherent thought momentarily stalled, clogged on shock and relief - - then started up again. Clark was back. She was gone. The two unconscious security guards were nowhere in sight. Something was wrong with the picture. Seriously. He just wasn’t sure what yet.

He found the gun by feel alone in the leaves and slipped it back into his coat pocket. Pushed himself to his feet, reflexively wiping debris from his coat while he looked around. If he hadn’t gotten completely turned around - - which was entirely likely in night shrouded forest, the facility was to the west - - and west was to the right. Maybe. It might be a better idea to retrace his steps to the dirt track and take the jeep back, rather than fumble around in the woods.

He could find his way around a city by instinct alone, but put him in the forest and he was lost. It wouldn’t have killed his father’s reputation to send him to the occasional cliché summer camp retreat when he’d been young enough to actually enjoy it. He might have picked up a thing or two about woodland survival. Clark probably knew.

Which thought made Lex growl a little and think about bringing up charges for trespassing once he’d gotten this mess under control.

“Get the hell off my property.” He snapped, turning on his heel and stalking back the way he’d come.

“Why were your men chasing her, Lex?”

He could hear Clark crunching through the underbrush after him. “Is it because of the rumors about what she could do after the meteor shower? Is she another one of your sick experiments?”